Updates to this story

All eyes are on Spintel this week at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco. But rival AMD is up to its knees in promo and spin as well - it's going to really focus its efforts on promoting the 40nm single core Ontario and dual core Zacate APUs, made by TSMC. The Atom Smashing netbook behemoths are high on the agenda.

We've heard word from a very reliable source in the Asian market that it's not all sugardrops and rainbows in AMD-Land. It's true that AMD's kit will probably have a very competitive TDP and that the GPU performance may wee all over Intel's, but it's going to be having some serious trouble when it comes to volumes of parts.

The tech press has been saying for the past year or so that fabs - including TSMC and Global Foundries - have had and continue to have a capacity shortage particularly in the 40nm and below space. AMD and Nvidia are both already on allocation from TSMC on 40nm GPUs.

Our source has informed us that while AMD waxes lyrical about its TSMC forecasts for new parts, versus the 32nm parts GloFo is working on, volumes are very low for a high volume segment like netbooks. AMD is set to launch with great fanfare at CES and will be shouting out about partners from the rooftop, but there's no chance it will be able to even come close to satisfying demand.

This means demand from both partners and consumers is going to be high for AMD netbooks in the first quarter of next year - they want the kit, but they won't be able to get it.

And this is going to be further magnified after AMD admitted on its last earnings call that the 32nm launch in partnership with Glofo is going to be at least a few months late.

Our industry insider reckons AMD will have pushed its kit, full force, to the front line - but it's not going to be able to deliver the goods.

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So what else is new? Tis no secret that DAAMIT hasn't the fab capacity available as Chipzilla, but hey, they keep working at it. What else can they do? Not show up for party? Hand everything over to Intel?

What will be, will be. People will make decisions based on a number of factors, and not much will change. ~80% of market will be Intel, and ~15-18% will be DAAMIT. Such is life in the land of the pigmy muffin-makers.

Ronh - 13 Sep 16:21

It is really too bad that the FTC didn't lift a finger about Otellini's well-known monopolistic market manipulations until AMD was mostly dead. Otellini makes Berlusconi seem like and angel.